All mariners and passengers have spoken with delight of the region of the trade winds, not only on account of the favoring gale, but its genial influence, the transparent atmosphere, the splendid sunsets, and the brilliancy of the unclouded heavens, day and night. Columbus, in recording his first voyage into their territory, compares the air, soft and refreshing without being cool, to that of the pure and balmy April mornings he had experienced in Andalusia, wanting but the song of the nightingale and the sight of the groves, to complete the fancy that he was sailing along the Guadalquivir, “It is marvelous,” observes Las Casas, “the suavity which we experience when half way toward these Indies; and the more the ships approach the lands so much more do they perceive the temperance and softness of the air, the clearness of the sky, and the amenity and fragrance sent forth from the groves and forests; much more certainly than in April in Andalusia.” Humboldt lingers with pleasure, upon his first acquaintance with the tropical regions at sea, upon the mildness of the climate and the beauty of the southern sky, gradually opening new constellations to the view, stars contemplated from infancy progressively sinking and finally disappearing below the horizon, an unknown firmament unfolding its aspect, and scattered nebulæ rivaling in splendor the milky way. “A traveler,” he states, “has no need of being a botanist, to recognize the torrid zone, on the mere aspect of its vegetation; and without having acquired any notions of astronomy, without any acquaintance with the celestial charts of Flamstead and De la Caille, he feels he is not in Europe, when he sees the immense constellation of the Ship, or the phosphorescent clouds of Magellan, arise on the horizon. We pass those latitudes, as if we were descending a river, and we might deem it no hazardous undertaking, if we made the voyage in an open boat.” Mr. Bailey, in his Four Years in the West Indies, relates an adventure, nearly answering to that here referred to. The master of one of the small fishing smacks that ply along the coast of Scotland, who had no other knowledge of navigation than that which enabled him to keep his dead reckoning, and to take the sun with his quadrant at noon-day, having heard that sugar was a very profitable cargo, determined, by way of speculation, upon a trip to St. Vincent, to bring a few hogsheads of the commodity on his own account into the Scottish market. Accordingly, he freighted his vessel; made sail; crossed the Bay of Biscay in a gale; got into the trade winds, and scudded before them, at the rate of seven knots an hour, trusting to his dead reckoning all the way. He spoke no vessel during the whole voyage; and never once saw land until on the morning of the thirty-fifth day, when he descried St. Vincent’s right ahead, and running down, under a light breeze, along the windward coast of the island, came to anchor.